My Friend The Artist

Readmg Sebaastian Smee's excellent book about artistic rivalries reminded me of the career of a friend.  He joined our high school jumior class as a newcomer  He was not at all the kind of person I was attracted to; neither his looks guaranteed my interest nor his intellect.  He was bright enough but not overly so.  A big tall blond guy with too large a nose, eyes that tended to stare at you rather than embracing you or flirting with you.  He was direct and obvious, not my kind of guy, but he was decent and friendly.  And he was tall, and reasonably athletic, and he was a very good tennis player.  Unllike other overly normal masculine teen males, he chose to be a friend of an overt gay boy, mainly because I was thrilled when he proclaimed he was meant to be an artist.He stays in my mind all these years because he did become an artist, and I acquired four of his paintings over the years.  Two of them have been with me for decades.  One I have had since we were maybe twenty or twenty one.  He painted it when he was nineteen in his parents' basement. I saw it and I bought it -- a stunnner--  oil on canvas depicting a collection of bottle shaped objects, each defined with space between, projected against a black horizontal bar.  It is very much a Morandi-like piece, these bottles, except that the one on the far left of the line is a bottle with another behind, and the two of them when viewed without too much effort of imagination show a well endowed penis with very large testicles.  I know my predilections make such identifications tediously obvious and I never mentioned them to the artist who as I can well imagine would have blushed, a dark red flush lingering on his face, his mouth quivering in confusion.  He was a sweet kid.  Years went by and we met again when both of us were teaching at Stanford University, me classics, he art.  By now he had a gallery in the area. My wife and I acquired a strange somewhat cubist hilltop scene done while he was traveling in Italy.  The hills in outline, the buildings in the town on the hill bathed in an orange glow suggesting sunset were all of them, like so many cubes.  It did not work really.  Never a favorite.  My wife claimed it in the divorce and I don't know what happened to it.  At much the same time I bought from him as a present for my wife a large graphite sketch of the three seated figures of  Giorgione's (now attributed to Titian) Fete Champetre which some see as an inspiration for Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe.  My friend drew superbly and this is a breathtaking example of his skill.  My wife, for whatever reason, declined it in the divorce settlement, and so I took it willingly and it has been something I look at every day, for the constant of the human male's need for clothing and the woman's nudity demanded by male artists.  The painting, perhaps it is a watercolor, that my wife took in exchange, demanded is rather the word, is another marvelous piece painted from a photo I believe of an elderly Italian couple standing before a table, and the tones and accents of their depiction are elided, the slippage of form and color is one of the delightful aspects of the piece.  My daughter now has it beautifully set out on the wall of her living room.  The artist had a wife, three daughters, played lots of tennis, and I thought of him as quite boring if a dear man over all.  My wife was more on his wave length, and I always hoped that they had an affair.  I can imagine him up in Heaven blushing at the idea.  He took up chevrons in paintings when that became all the rage; he became less original, and he lost out in the competition of the art world.  You can mention his name and sometimes people nod in recognition or fake it. But he will always be wonderful, his paintings that I have, at least to me